1. Field of the Invention
The current invention relates generally to digital image processing, and more particularly to finding regions of interest in synthetic images.
2. Description of Related Art
Slide presentations have become a popular manner for making presentations since the development of PowerPoint® and other presentation software packages. Slides can be easily generated with colorful backgrounds and graphics to convey information. An important challenge is figuring out ways to manage and visualize collections of slides and their content. Another challenge is viewing presentation content on small displays and mobile devices where the content must be condensed to efficiently and effectively be displayed on smaller screens.
In U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/815,389, entitled “EXTRACTING VIDEO REGIONS OF INTEREST” and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/815,354, entitled “GENERATING A HIGHLY CONDENSED VISUAL SUMMARY”, a method was disclosed to summarize and condense a video using a Stained-Glass Visualization, which shows a video using a storyboard generated from regions of interest (ROI) in the key frames of the highly ranked video segments. The ROIs are laid out and the gaps are filled by extending the ROIs using a Voronoi technique. This produces irregular boundaries and the result looks like a stained glass. Along with the visualization method, an algorithm was provided for finding the ROIs in a video segment based on motion analysis.
The Stained-Glass visualization is applicable to photos and images, producing a collage from a given set of images. Stained-Glass type collages can be used in many ways. For example, a wallet-sized collage of family members can be displayed on a PDA or cell phone, larger collages of a party can be put on a Web page and shared with friends, and poster sized collages of scenic photos from a vacation can be printed and framed. Additionally, summarizations of a number of images may be presented in a tightly fit manner.
The earlier algorithm for finding ROIs in videos, being based on motion analysis, does not work for synthetic images such as a series of slides. Additionally, a set of slides has distinctive color and textural background and foreground features that traditional image processing methods do not address. What is needed is a method for finding ROIs in synthetic images such that collections of images can be managed and visualized and presented on displays.